Archives for November 2015

Nutanix provides an option to monitor and manage multiple clusters through a single web console. The multicluster view, known as Prism Central, is a centralized management tool that runs as a separate VM. Prism Central provides the following features:

* Single sign on for all registered clusters
* Summary dashboards across all clusters with health, activity, performance, and utilization information
* Multicluster analytics capabilities
* One click access to the web console for a cluster
* Easy ability to switch between clusters

With the default memory configuration of 8GB, Prism Central can support a maximum of 50 clusters. By increasing memory capacity to 16GB and expanding its virtual disk to 320GB (60GB + data partition of 260GB), Prism Central can support a maximum of 100 clusters. The actual numbers may be higher but this is what has been tested in house. You need to resize the partition so it best to log a ticket into support at they can quickly help you out.

It’s great to hear success stories in the service provider space other than AWS. Agilis Networks needed a new more resilient storage solution that was powerful and responsive enough to support all of their external b2b platforms. Making money for them was also not spending countless hours fixing problems, the promise of hyper-converged with web-scale properties made Nutanix the right choice.

In the Agilis Networks business model, customers can buy cycles all the way up to the VMs, according to Frescura. “We provide data center hosting, power, air conditioning, server cycles, and VMs to our customers,” he explained. “But unlike a much larger service, we don’t serve hundreds or thousands of customers. We aren’t a commodity provider, we only serve clients with very rigorous up time requirements. We o er a very high level of reliability and redundancy,so our solution is the perfect fit for customers that need a robust service.

Using Nutanix Prism
Agilis Networks is now using the Nutanix Prism interface to manage the environment. “We keep an eye on the messages and alerts, and our storage admin checks in about once a day just to make sure everything is good,” Frescura said. “There haven’t been any problems since we deployed the systems, but it’s always reassuring to see the statistics. It really is a set it and forget it platform.”

Working with Nutanix Channel Partner of the year for 2014 and 2015, Zycom Technologies, Nutanix was selected as the best solution to meet their needs. As well as obtaining high availability for all of their applications, they have reduced their datacenter footprint by 3x and seen significant savings in power costs.

Reasons to Make Acropolis your infrastructure platform of choice – Nutanix Community Podcast Episode 31 This week we chat with Sudarshan Srinivasan about Nutanix Acropolis and Prism. This podcast will form the base as we go deeper into the technical areas that make up Acropolis, App Mobility Fabric, distributed storage fabric and the Acropolis hypervisor.

Below is a video on Why Swiss Lottery selected the Acropolis Hypeviosr for their infrastructure

The Analysis dashboard allows you to create charts that can monitor dynamically a variety of performance measures. The graphic nature eases troubleshooting using the right side of your brain to visually see problems that are correlated with metrics, events and alerts. To view the Analysis dashboard, simply select Analysis from the pull-down list on the far left of the main menu inside of Prism. You can also click on any performance graph inside of Prism and it will take you there and load that graph into the Analysis section.

Layer different metrics with events & alerts to see how healthy your environment is doing.

You can create any number of charts. There are two types of charts, metric and entity. A metric chart monitors a single metric for one or more entities. An entity chart monitors one or more metrics for a single entity. As an example, a metric is something like IOPS and entity could be a VM.

There are over 50 Metrics you can track on Nutanix side.

Sampling
The analysis page pulls data at different sampling interval based of the requested time range. If the time range is huge, the sampling interval is bigger too.

The Range Picker displays a time line that sets the duration for the monitor displays. To set the time interval, click the time period (1 hour, 1 day, 1 week, WTD [week to date], 1 month) from the list at the top. To customize the monitor duration, drag the time line end points to the desired times on the time line.

The stats are manged by Arithmos in Prism and persisted in the Nutanix implementation of NoSQL Cassandra. The amount of space is propotioanl to the number of VMs and virtual disks. A cluster with 100 VMs and 100 virtual disks should have around 2GB per node. Arithmos compresses the stats in Cassandra. Therefore, the number should be lower. The stats in Cassandra is stored for 90 days. This is controlled by a gflag so it can be changed if needed but the best option is use Prism Central to store stats longer. Customers can also access the stats through REST APIs and then store them somewhere else if needed.

It’s important to note that if you’re not using the Acropolis hypervisor and you have run a tool for management like vCenter or SCCVM that there is no impact on these tools. Nutanix stat collection will not make vCenter slower as an example. All stats regardless of hyperviosr are taken directly from the host. There is no separate database or license that is needed to maintain performance monitoring.

You can use the REST-API explorer to help build your code.

Why are my IO Stats different?

A variety of statistics are displayed in the web console screens. There are three possible sources for a statistic:

Hypervisor. When the hypervisor can provide usage statistics, those figures are displayed where appropriate. ESXi provides such statistics, but Hyper-V and AHV do not. Getting the statistics from ESXi means numbers displayed in the web console should match the corresponding ones in vCenter.

Controller (Stargate). When hypervisor statistics are unavailable or inappropriate, the Controller VM provides statistics from Stargate (see Cluster Components). Controller-reported statistics might differ from those reported by the hypervisor for the following reasons:

An NFS client might break up large I/O requests into smaller I/Os before issuing them to the NFS server, thus increasing the number of operations reported by the controller.
The hypervisor might read I/Os from the cache in the hypervisor, which are not counted by the controller.

Disk (Stargate). Stargate can provide statistics from both the controller and disk perspective. The difference is that the controller perspective includes read I/Os from memory as well as disk I/Os, while the disk perspective includes just the disk I/Os.

You can never live Prism but if your physical infrastruce you have to monitor and your Microsoft shop you don’t want multiple tools for your Ops team. Nutanix provides management packs that support using the Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) to monitor a Nutanix cluster. Nutanix provides two management packs:

• Hardware Management Pack. This management pack collects information about hardware elements of
a cluster including fans, power supplies, disks, and nodes.

The management packs collect information about software (cluster) elements through SNMP and hardware elements through ipmiutil and REST API calls and then package that information for SCOM to digest. SCOM can manage not only Nutanix Hyper-V clusters but, ESXi and AHV as well.

Customers can download the management pack thru the online portal. Support for SolarWinds, Nagios and Zenoss are available as well.

With Nutanix, customers can start their Splunk deployment small and then scale out the infrastructure as needed to meet data ingest and retention requirements. And the Nutanix Xtreme Computing Platform ensures that the system will remain available, providing consistent ingest, indexing, and search performance. Administrators can focus on Splunk and the application, not on the infrastructure, adding compute and storage resources transparently to the cluster as the environment grows.

Running Splunk on Acorpolis is simple, secure and can scale.

Simple

If you can open a web browser and log into Prism your good to go. No hypervisor management to setup and all scaling and data migrations issues are handle by the storage fabric.

Secure

Nutanix believes that a system is only as secure at the last time its security posture was checked. Nutanix provides a Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG) that uses machine-readable code to automate compliance against rigorous common standards. You can quickly assess and remediate your platform to ensure that all regulatory requirements are exceeded.

Scale

With the Nutanix solution you can start small and scale. A single Nutanix block (up to four nodes) provides from 20-40+ TB storage and 96+ cores in a compact footprint. Given the modularity of the solution, you can scale per node, giving you the ability to accurately match supply with demand and minimize the upfront CapEx. If the speed of solution is meeting your requirements you can just simply add storage nodes and save cash for another project.

Download and read all the work Steve Poitras put into the Splunk Nutanix to get all of your sizing information.

The ability to make fast decisions in an intelligent matter would be a good trait regardless of your role, device, or system. If you were a financial investor and you only looked at your portfolio once a month you could be in real sad state of affairs. Companies and the people that run them spend a lot of time and money to make trades at almost at the speed of light. Sure, there may be times that you make a bad trade or market forces necessitate dumping the stock and reinvest elsewhere. Nothing is perfect but you want the ability to react quickly so you can recover before it’s too late. While the “set and forget” mentality may reduce the stress for most of the month, you probably don’t want to be the one left telling your loved ones the college tuition is gone.

I was messing around in my lab and all of sudden had problems accessing Prism with Firefox. I was able to access Prism fine with Chrome so I was kinda left scratching my head. Firefox has the best keyboard support for the VM console so I wanted to get this working. One of the Prism engineers point me a page that fixed my issue.